#21 - Nov. 15, 2013, 5:34 p.m.
First of all, other than paid faction changes (20 euros or so lol) there are no incentives from your side to improve the situation at all. In fact, doing nothing only generated more revenue for you guys due to paid faction changes, where the outnumbered faction simply joined the winning team.
Actually we have a great incentive to improve the situation: player happiness. If that isn't taken into account, we actually lose revenue. This is why we offer
free character migrations for people on realms with queues, and if the realm is heavily imbalanced in favour of a particular faction, we tailor the FCM to ease that imbalance.
So what could be done to somewhat solve the problem or flatten such an inbalance? Well, you could offer free faction changes. Other games have done that, you could do it. You have the tech to switch races in the blink of an eye. So there's no excuse not to offer it. While of course, for some realms where you have distributions like 1 : 10 you might want to offer a bit more than just a free faction change. Because, who would want to switch to the helplessly outnumbered faction anyway? But maybe a mount, or a pet (you are good a creating that stuff and selling it for 5-20 bucks anyway) or maybe some recruit a friend benefits. There are possibilities. There are things Blizzard could do.
We've experimented with this before, and found that people are reluctant to move without their friends, guilds, etc. Plus, as it was mentioned above, no one wants to be the first one to move because they don't want to run the risk of ending up on the minority side. I personally don't think any kind of incentive like you mentioned would be enough to persuade a significant number of players to change faction, be disconnected from at least some of their network of friends, and potentially put them in a weaker position than before from a PvP standpoint.
Having said that, we developed Connected Realms technology to help with low population realms, and we'll continue to look into ways to help with faction imbalance.